I recently spent a weekend with friends in a beautiful country house in Cornwall. As I watched the fields roll, wave-like, in the sea winds, it dawned on me that this idyllic setting was anything but. For miles, all I could see were cornfields growing on rock-hard, barren earth; not a single other plant was growing amid the green stalks. It was both shocking and extraordinary to see how, in an instant, the same gentle landscape could suddenly seem different, stark, and lifeless.
Nowadays, agricultural monoculture is so prevalent that we don’t even notice it. From our neatly trimmed, dandelion-banished, perfect-green lawns to the vast expanses of cereals, sugar beet, and even grapes that blanket our countryside, we like to have nature under control. Where before you might have seen small pockets of pastureland, woodland, and crop fields, carved up by hedgerows that acted as wildlife motorways, today views are dominated by monotony. Since 1950 the number of farms in the United States, for example, has halved, while the average size of those remaining has doubled, so that today only two percent of the country’s farms produce 70 percent of its vegetables.
Monoculture galore in California: miles of grapes and more grapes.
The 20th century changed the face of agriculture. It streamlined, mechanized, and “simplified” farming in an attempt to increase yields and maximize short-term profits. This industrialization became known as the “Green Revolution.” “We call it ‘intensification,’ but it was intensification per farmer, not per square meter,” explain agronomists Claude and Lydia Bourguignon. “In North America, yes, a single farmer can manage 500 hectares alone, but the traditional agro-silvo-pastoral farming system was actually far more productive per square meter.”
Grape-growing, like the rest of agriculture, is no exception. “Traditionally, in Italy, vines were very biodiverse,” explains Stefano Bellotti, a natural grower in Piedmont. “They grew alongside trees or vegetables, and growers also cultivated wheat, beans, chickpeas, and even fruit trees, between the rows. Biodiversity was very important.”
Modern agriculture has been about developing duplicable approaches that can be applied uniformly wherever you are. It is what natural Californian grower Mary Morwood Hart calls “textbook farming.” Mary explains: “These consultants come around telling you how many leaves there should be per bunch of grapes without considering any of the particularities of your site.” In fact, as Tony Coturri, a natural grower in Sonoma, puts it, the industry has become so mechanized and detached from its roots that not only has “most wine today never even seen a human hand,” but also “the growers don’t call themselves ‘farmers.’ They don’t see viticulture or grape-growing as an agricultural pursuit.” This approach couldn’t be more different from that of growers like Sébastien Riffault, in Sancerre, France, who considers each vine individually. He says, “They’re like people: each plant needs different things at different times.”
One of the biggest causes of this disconnection seems to have been the development of synthetic chemical treatments (such as fungicides, pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, and fertilizers), which were all created to facilitate farmers’ work, but which, inevitably, led to them stepping back from the needs of the living world in their care. The problem is that spraying herbicides or feeding plants with nitrogen-rich fertilizers, for example, doesn’t start and end in the vineyard. It causes fundamental imbalances in the ecosystem, with some products leaking through into the groundwater. “This is the very start of the chain,” says natural grower Emmanuel Houillon from the Jura, in eastern France. “There are even synthetic products that remain attached to water molecules during evaporation so that they fall with raindrops.”
According to the World Wildlife Fund, the amount of pesticides sprayed on fields has increased 26-fold over the past 50 years. Vineyards, in particular, seem to have played a huge part, with the application of synthetic pesticides to European vineyards having increased by 27 percent since 1994, according to the Pesticide Action Network (PAN). PAN states that “Grapes now receive a higher dose of synthetic pesticides than any other major crop, except citrus.”
Traditionally, grapes were harvested by hand. This unmechanized approach continues today in many vineyards driven by quality.
A wild Californian vineyard where grapes rub shoulders with apple trees, brush, and native grasses.
This has a detrimental effect on soil life, Claude and Lydia Bourguignon explain. “Soils harbor 80 percent of the world’s biomass. Earthworms alone, for example, amount to about the same weight as all other animals combined. But, since 1950, European numbers have decreased from two tonnes per hectare to less than 100kg.”
This biological degradation has a profound effect on the soil, eventually also leading to chemical degradation and massive soil erosion. “When agriculture began some 6,000 years ago, 12 percent of the planet was covered in desert; today, 32 percent is,” continue Claude and Lydia. “And out of the two billion hectares of desert that we have created in this time, half of this was created in the 20th century.” It is a yearly decline that is drastically diminishing our natural capital. “Recent estimates suggest that each year more than 10 million hectares of cropland will be degraded or lost, as wind and rain erode topsoil,” explains ecologist and author Tony Juniper.
We are not separate from our environment and even less so from what we eat and drink. In fact, two separate studies by PAN (in 2008) and the French consumer organization UFC-Que Choisir (in 2013) found pesticide residues in the wines they tested. While the totals were tiny (measured in micrograms per liter), they were nonetheless significantly greater (sometimes more than 200 times higher) than the accepted standard for United Kingdom drinking water. Some of the residues were even carcinogenic, developmental or reproductive toxins, or endocrine disruptors. Given that wine is 85 percent water, it certainly makes you wonder.
Natural wines require precision as well as a lot of care and attention from those producing them.
SOILS HARBOR 80 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S BIOMASS.
EARTHWORMS ALONE, FOR EXAMPLE, AMOUNT TO ABOUT THE SAME WEIGHT AS ALL OTHER ANIMALS COMBINED.
